Florida Standard Lease Agreement: Fill & Download for Free

This isn’t a landlord, so much as a property management company. The actual owner of the property was wonderful and dropped his management company after this incident.This was about four years ago. I was a newly commissioned officer in the Navy sent down to Pensacola, Forida, for the first component of the Naval Aviation pipeline. While the classup time for API (aviation preflight indoctrination) was variable, I knew that I would be transferring within the year to the base one hour north after I completed API.When my roommate and I were signing the lease for our place, I read the contract thoroughly. Florida has laws that let you break a lease if you have military orders. What my fellow new ensign snd I were offered was a standard year-long lease contract. I asked if they could draft a more variable contract, and they said no, so I asked them to draft a letter of understanding that they knew that my roommate and I would be breaking the lease within the year due to follow-on military orders that we had (copies of which were provided to them).So in summary, we had military orders moving us before a year was out, Florida has a law allowing tenants to break a lease in that circumstance, and we had it in writing and signed that the property management company knew we would be breaking the lease before the year was out.When we inevitably did leave five months later, they said we needed to pay for the rest of the year. I remember laughing, asked if they just wanted to pay my lawyer upfront to make the inevitable settlement easier, and told them I would be contacting the property owner (a retired Navy E-8 who specifically wanted to lend to API students) immediately. I remember talking to the management afterwards, talking about why their plan of action, which I had started recording with my phone, shouldn’t go to higher authorities. Admittedly this was mostly theater; they’d pulled up the letter in our lease agreement and I cited the specific Florida law, and my roommate was already calling the housing office for NAS Pensacola about this flagrant abuse, which I was happy to inform the manager about; the manager was at that point begging us to stop.We didn’t of course. I’m from New York, where real estate crooks are ubiquitous. I inquired of some friends a few years later about whether or not the company was still around and apparently they went out of business.

If a person has established domicile in a residence, whether or not they pay rent or have a written lease or rental agreement, they have rights.Most standard leases and rental agreements have clauses that limit the number of nights, and/or the number of consecutive nights a guest can stay during a calendar year. Have you ever stopped to wonder why? It's to prevent a guest from establishing domicile. Once a guest has domicile, it becomes much more difficult to have that person removed.All tenants have rights. There need not be a written contract between tenant and landlord for a tenant to have rights. A tenant need not be charged anything per month in order to have rights.

You could, up to the point that one of your tenants took you to court. When you have them sign a lease document, it is standard to have that document notarized. It would be difficult to “prove” they intended to sign a lease, or even that it was them that did it. Tenant law is quite a bit different from the short term visitor relationship of AirBnB. Remember, even if you have a signed lease, and they don’t pay the rent, it can be very difficult to evict a tenant.(I am not a lawyer, but played on on TV. Don’t take anything I say at face value.)